Methodism in Victorian Oxford: The Oxford Wesleyan Local Preachers’ Book 1830–1902

Despite the existence of a few specialist organizations, local record societies remain the most important publishers of editions of historical material in England. When it comes to religion, their focus, perhaps understandably, has been on the older churches—the Church of England and its medieval predecessors, leading to a neglect of more recent arrivals on the scene, especially the Protestant Nonconformist churches. The Oxfordshire Record Series has, hitherto, been no exception to this rule, producing over a dozen volumes of institutional sources for the Anglicans and their predecessors, but none for the Nonconformists. The society is to be congratulated, therefore, on finally breaking its duck with the very welcome appearance of Martin Wellings’s edition of two nineteenth-century minute books for the Oxford Wesleyan Methodist Local Preachers’ meeting, providing an almost unbroken record between 1830 and 1902. A well-crafted introduction adds considerable value to the edited material. It first sketches the broader history of Wesleyan Methodism, its changing relationship with the Established Church, with the non-Wesleyan branches of Methodism, and with wider Nonconformity in the nineteenth century. Next, it briefly considers the progress of Wesleyanism in Oxfordshire, with a particular emphasis on the shock of the mid-century Wesleyan Reform secession and the subsequent revival in local Wesleyan fortunes in the 1870s and 1880s. The discussion moves on to the role of preaching in general and that of local preachers in particular, examining Wesleyan criteria for good preaching and the processes for the training and deployment of local preachers.Finally, the introduction focuses on the material found in the minute books themselves. Here the opportunity to consider a large number of local preachers as a body allows analysis of change over time. For example, the preachers of the 1830s and 1840s were mostly Oxfordshire born and generally drawn from the ranks of agricultural labourers, artisans, and small business owners. Their counterparts in the 1890s, on the other hand, were as likely to have been born outside the county as within it and their occupational range had also broadened to include men in a range of white-collar professions, major Oxford entrepreneurs like the Salter brothers (owners of the local boatyard), and, as the largest single group among the preachers, students at the university. These changes demonstrate the extent to which Oxford Wesleyanism continued to reflect its environment over the course of the nineteenth century, with the general growth of the city, the impact of empire-led globalization, and the liberalization of the university to grant full admission to Nonconformist students, all contributing to changes in the cohort of local preachers. Turning from the preachers themselves to the places in which they preached, Wellings notes that, when combined with other records, the minutes provide insight into the phases of growth and consolidation of local Wesleyanism. They also reveal the practicalities of running a circuit where the flexibility of the system facilitated entrepreneurial expansion at a relatively low cost, but where the reliance on volunteer labour might leave distant or small societies relatively neglected, as preachers were more often deterred from keeping their appointment by difficulties of travel and a lack of encouragement.The minute books themselves, which comprise two-thirds of the volume, are meticulously edited, copiously footnoted, and repay close reading as a testimony to the experience of running the remarkable Wesleyan system across the best part of a century. They reflect quiet triumphs of consolidation as well as periods of rapid expansion, and display the dysfunctions as well as the advantages of a circuit in action. Carefully attended to, they yield insights into some of the most important episodes of the period suggesting, for example, that a hard line by the itinerant preachers during the reform crisis of 1849–51 may have contributed to its impact on the circuit, which lost a slate of popular preachers as well as around 40 per cent I suggest percent, as this spelling is allowed in the Oxford Dictionary of English of its membership. Although, as Wellings notes, the minutes cannot provide insight into the huge contribution of women to the movement, they certainly showcase those men who were its local mainstay. The largely uneducated Jonathan Skidmore might casually be written off as yet another example of the ignorant village preacher deprecated by the Wesleyans’ Anglican rivals, but we also learn that his hearers were inspired by the simplicity of his character and that while ‘his sentences were many of them ungrammatical, yet one seldom failed in obtaining clear light on the object of his address’. Similarly, the eccentric Billy Birmingham, whose free-wheeling revivalism and occasional descent into what the Local Preachers’ meeting described as ‘buffoonery’ in the pulpit, clearly discomfited some of his more conventional brethren, might be reduced to simply an anecdote, did not the minutes also show him to have continued his ministry on the Oxford Circuit for four decades. This is a volume that can be recommended without reservation. It is a fine example of scholarship and a valuable resource for the further study of Victorian Methodism. It deserves a wide readership among all those interested in the history of Christianity in England and published, as it is, at a relatively affordable price, it ought to receive one.

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